Coach travel

Outward bound

Austerity is changing the dynamics of the business

AT VICTORIA coach station in London, fleets of long-haul National Express buses with their brash red, white and blue logos chug out of the dingy station from the early hours, taking passengers to destinations from Cornwall in the far west of England to the north of Scotland. The number of rucksacks and iPod headphones reflects the bus company’s primarily young customer base.

That has become more marked since the end of a 50% government subsidy for elderly and disabled coach travellers in the autumn of 2011, part of widespread cuts in public spending. A million fewer passengers have made coach journeys since that change, which National Express Group admits has brought the toughest period since it was privatised in the 1980s. Pre-tax profits fell by 9% in 2012 from the previous year. On coach travel alone (the firm also owns rail franchises) operating profits tumbled by 40%, from £34m ($51m) in 2011 to £20m. National Express also faces competition from Megabus UK, which has moved more decisively to woo digitally alert young customers online.

Scheduled coach trips total about 35m a year, a fraction of the billion-plus journeys made by rail. The main reason coach travel is suffering, says Chris Cheek, a transport analyst, is that railway journeys have got faster, while most coaches’ speed has been restricted since 2010 to just over 60mph, with no use of the motorway fast lane for overtaking. As a result, coaches are safer but slower, and car users struggling with high petrol prices are more likely to shift to the railways.

But austerity is also a friend to the industry. More price-conscious middle-class folk are taking coaches to airports, rather than paying for expensive parking there. Journeys from towns on the south coast to London have also increased as passengers travel farther to work in the capital. A new coach route brings commuters from the Medway towns in Kent to London’s main business centres, charging lower fares than trains do.

Companies like National Express have long sought to shake off a dusty image. One former chief executive said he aspired to make the experience “cool and acceptable” as it is in Spain, where more families and professionals travel by intercity bus. These days, a marketing campaign seeks to rebrand travelling by coach as the green option, with lower carbon emissions per head than rail or car journeys.

The longest route offered by National Express remains the trip from Penzance to Inverness, taking a rump-numbing day. But British coach travel has never evoked the imaginative frisson of the American experience. Simon and Garfunkel boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh “to look for America”, and Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly packed off her slightly-used husband on a coach in order to pursue her adventures in Manhattan.

More prosaically, Greyhound’s American operation was taken over by the Scottish-based FirstGroup in 2007 and soon attempted to expand into Britain, offering more luxurious vehicles with leather seats and generous legroom. This was not a success. On one occasion a single passenger turned up to make the journey from Southampton to London. Greyhound’s sole remaining British route goes from Bristol to Cardiff and Swansea.

If passengers are pragmatic about cost, they are at least nostalgic for some coach stations. A campaign to save the brutalist concrete version in Preston, north-west England, recently resulted in the station being listed by the World Monuments Fund as worth preserving. A local businessman has put up £2m to save the 1960s structure—once Europe’s largest—though the latest council ruling makes demolition likely. In that case, coaches will roll forth from a station integrated into a shopping centre. It’s hardly the stuff of iconic anthems, but it is cheap, cheerful—and young.